Mukherjee’s elegant and accomplished debut novel is full of subtle cultural
ironies, says David Robinson.

Abused, impoverished, orphaned as a teenager, Calcutta-born Ritwik has had a wretched childhood, from which England and Englishness offer a kind of escape. At his mother’s deathbed, he is clutching a copy of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Quotes from the Pope and Shakespeare swirl around in his head. But the England he first visits, as an impoverished student, is a more treacherous place than he has budgeted for. Nobody is quite what they seem.

Even the stop-start London drizzle mystifies a young man who has grown up with monsoons.

There are a lot of subtle cultural ironies in Neel Mukherjee’s debut novel, which is what makes the book such a delight. Its gay young hero, who is reduced to working as a King’s Cross rent boy, has had a comically bookish upbringing. When a client says: “Penny for your thoughts?”, the archaic phrase transports him back to the colonial era, when the staple authors read by Indian schoolboys were Enid Blyton and P?G Wodehouse. He is ill-prepared for the violence lurking beneath the surface of London life.

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In one respect, Ritwik lands on his feet, finding lodgings in south London with a batty octogenarian landlady who is semi-continent and has gin bottles hidden around the house. Her life has been even more blighted by family tragedy than his, and the gauche friendship that develops between them is beautifully caught, the best thing in the book. But away from his lodgings, he finds himself on shakier ground.

He thinks he is on to a good thing when one of his gay clients, Zafar, turns out to be fabulously wealthy, with a suite at the Dorchester. But where does his money come from? And why has he got four passports — British, Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian? Suddenly, tragically, the orphan from Calcutta is out of his depth.

A Life Apart is an elegant and accomplished debut, a novel of many shades. It blends the poignancy of a coming-of-age story with the rawer excitements of an urban thriller laced with sex and violence. It is only a shame that Mukherjee has gilded the lily, interspersing the bittersweet story of young Ritwik with extracts from a novel that Ritwik is writing — and which are far less engaging than the real thing. As so often, literary fiction proves its own worst enemy.